An epileptic writing about epilepsy, the brain, and perception

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Watched a Jazz Messengers gig from Paris in ‘59 and Lee Morgan, all of 21 years old, was unbelievable. Astonishing creativity. The chances he took and never flubbed in those solos, leaping over precipices, seeing around corners, weaving a short story’s worth of narrative into every solo…. damn. When you’re that young all this stuff is new and you’re seeing these things for the first time; your brain is a huge mass of neurons you’re exploring for the first time, and the neural pathways you follow can become established routes you’ll follow again and again. You could hear those in his playing, the licks and ideas that would come up over and over again during his career. And you’d hear things he might have explored just that once and never gone back to. As you get older and older you do that less and less, the brain hardwires into distinct paths that you perfect and improve and the other synapses wither and disappear and ideas you had at 21 will never be there again. Possibilities disappear. Eventually you don’t even see those pathways anymore. You read stuff you wrote forty years ago and have no idea of all the possibilities that were before you then but you weren’t yet good enough to write them down. A twenty something brain is a marvelous thing, a mass of neuronal potential just waiting to be shaped, trillions upon trillions upon trillions of possible thoughts, and we will never have that range of cognitive possibilities before us again.

So sitting on the couch goofing around on the iPhone I suddenly realized I had jelly on my hand. And my arm. Both arms. Both hands. Sticky strawberry jam. I’d had a couple crackers with jam for dessert and apparently some had slipped from the Akmak and dolloped onto my shirt.

Panic. I leaped to my feet, ran into the kitchen, removed the radioactive shirt, rolled it into a ball with the jelly inside and dropped it into the washer. Then I returned to the kitchen sink with the hot water on full blast and lathered soap all over my hands, scrubbing furiously, then up and down both arms, then my torso where the stickiness theoretically could’ve come into contact with my bare skin. Finally, scrubbed like a surgeon, I dried off and put on a clean shirt. I could still feel the tackiness, the hint if stickiness all over, on me, on everything. Hallucinating stickiness. Me, still this huge giant deep voiced dude at 62, completely losing it because of maybe a quarter of a tea spoon of strawberry preserves on my shirt.

Some things don’t change. To think I had believed I’d gotten beyond all of this. I’d made progress. I stay clear of maple syrup but I use honey. I wash the outside of the jar and thoroughly wash my hands afterward, and if–horror!–a drop of honey (or jelly) gets on my shirt it goes immediately into the washing machine, but I do use honey. Just not those hideous squeeze bottles. I won’t go near them. They shouldn’t even be legal.

It’s a phobia, yes. I guess everyone’s allowed one without necessarily being a nut and this is mine. And though it is as stupid as any phobia at least it’s sanitary, and easy to conceal. People think I just don’t like pancakes, though actually I love pancakes. I had some a couple years ago, feeling like a person with a fear of heights going skydiving. What a rush.

But as delicious as they were I just hate the stickiness of the syrup even more. Tactile trumps taste every time. Touch came before taste. I doubt critters in the Pre-Cambrian were savoring the flavors of the stromatolites they munching. They could feel them, though. My hypersensitivity to stickiness is evolutionary atavism, touch over taste, reeling from the icky like some vastly ancient invertebrate. It’s in my DNA. Or so I told myself in one night of overthinking. Though I don’t think I believed it. This is a fucked up Homo sapien sapien thing. Maybe one of Richard Dawkin’s memes. As our frontal lobes got bigger and bigger all sorts of ridiculous things get blown way out of proportion. Breast size. Religion. Cats. Stickiness. Though that’s still a rare one. Otherwise everyone would be as terrified of maple syrup as we are of spiders. Though I’m not scared of spiders, actually.

It does have a name, this stickyphobia, but it’s impossible to say and utterly unspellable and refers mainly to the fear of having peanut butter stuck to the roof of your mouth, which is just stupid. How can anyone be scared of peanut butter? It’s like being scared of clowns. Get over it. And no, I don’t want to go to IHOP. Not until they steam clean the place. And stop selling pancakes.

(From August, 2014, and I just wasted several minutes trying to figure out if this should be on bricksscience.com or bricksbrain.com.)

Every day on Facebook is a bombardment of What Whatever Are You? quizzes. I think they’re a little creepy. All they do is feed data to the data miners. That’s what they’re designed for. Every time we answer one of those questions, we have described a little more about ourselves. It’s that data that data miners with their incredibly sophisticated algorithms sift through to know what kinds of ads to show us, what kind of politics we prefer, and if we have criminal or terrorist proclivities or not. There is not a quiz we take on Facebook that is not used for data gathering. Selling that data is how Facebook makes its money. And to everybody freaking about the NSA knowing everything, where do you think they get the majority of their information?

You’re looking at it. (Well, you are if you’re looking at this on Facebook.)

Whenever you hear news about Facebook altering its privacy policy or profile policy or requesting information, it is about getting more access to your data for the purposes of data mining.

Not understanding data mining is like watching television without comprehending advertising. Imagine watching TV and thinking that every single commercial you were watching was true and shown for your own benefit. Imagine having no skepticism whatsoever about ads on TV. It’s unimaginable.

Well, that is Facebook. People refuse to become skeptical. But think of it this way…the data mining industry knows more about you than you do. They know our thinking and behavior and how we respond to certain stimuli (such as questions in quizzes.) And they are already shaping our behavior. Five years ago none of us would have bothered taking those What Kind of Whatever Quizzes, stupid as they are, over and over and over. Now we can’t stop. They’re stupid, they’re a pain in the ass, they’re a waste of time, yet Facebook users love them. And the only reward we get is being told we are Napoleon or Bob Dylan or Star Wars or Rhett Butler. Maybe three seconds of pleasure. Tell me the data mining industry isn’t controlling our behavior. And that is just one example. I’m still trying to figure out what algorithm is involved in those moronic “Think of a city that does not contain an A. 90% of people wiil fail” quizzes. A zillion people respond. Why? It is so subtle it must be brilliant. And why is “will” so often misspelled? It was wll–no i–for a while. Lately they’re wiil (two i’s). Why?

90% of you reading this will say so what, I don’t care, I’m not worried about it. Think about that. Why is your natural skepticism neutralized? You probably distrust just about everything else. Even the most paranoid leftist and tea party people you will ever meet, people who see conspiracies everywhere, know What Classic Rock Band They Are.

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My latest writing on: Brick Wahl

Was out on the moondeck around midnight and the silence was something. A solitary siren set off the coyotes and for a minute there I could have been in the middle of the Mojave, but the siren keened away and the coyotes shushed. A bat fluttered by. An owl flapped from one tree to another […]

This Canter’s Rueben ought to make up for all the vegetarian meals I usually eat. I suppose the pickle is the vegan part. And there’s enough oil in these onion rings for a whole weekend of orgies. Slippin’ and a slidin’, gotta wash my hands. The pickle just squirted all across the table, iPad, and […]

My latest writing on: Brick's Science

Considering that in LA there is a big variety of stores (we have eighteen) that will deliver a huge range of groceries in under two hours to your home for a very minimal fee I am completely mystified as to why nearly everyone I know is still going shopping themselves. Grocery stores are probably the […]

Listening to these mockingbirds improv reminds me of a factoid I read today in Daniel Tammet’s Embracing the Wide Sky that in order for male songbirds to sing some of the incredibly complex songs which change constantly, up to one per cent of the neurons in their song center are replaced by new neurons every […]

My latest writing on: Brick's History

Finally saw The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie last night. Maggie Smith, gorgeous locations, etc. It seemed a rather nothing story about an incredibly irritating Scottish teacher and her perfect little students. La creme de la creme she called them. She worshipped beauty, art, perfection, punctuality. It began to get more interesting. A few plot twists and […]

Interesting bit in The Third Man that few probably pick upon anymore…after Holley Martins (Joseph Cotten) first meets Baron Kurtz, they go walking down the sidewalk together. Kurtz has vaguely Mediterranean features and it dawned on me that the character might be Jewish. It had never occurred to me before because Austria had been thoroughly […]

My latest writing on: Brick's Politics

Hoover flags, they called empty pockets in 1931, and they became emblematic of Herbert Hoover’s abject failure in dealing with the Great Depression. I suspect homemade face masks are becoming Trump’s Hoover Flags.

I admit it, I voted for Mike Bloomberg. I think it was the last one hundred mailings that won me over. Not that I read any of them. But there were so many it just had to be presidential. Liz Warren only sent a few, which I read. She had my vote for the first […]

My latest writing on: Brick's Picks

Found this in my drafts, completely forgotten. I only found it again when one of these bits–Walking About–wound up on a tee shirt in Australia. Seems I had once spent a late evening on YouTube digging up old tunes from my past life and writing about them. They’re not for the jazzbos, most of ’em, they’re […]

Staying in tonight, we’re going to see Chuck Manning at the York tomorrow. Been listening to ancient radio comedies all week. Amazing how weird and conceptual and hysterically funny this stuff was, TV comedy has rarely come close, and never gotten beyond it. The mind’s eye can visualize so much more than our meager real […]